Eulogy
by suzybishops
Summary: You are a cigarette drum, beating the sound of insomnia.


newbie to the fight club fandom, so hello good fellows, my name is nikki and i can't wait to get to know some of you. the song you should listen to with this is despair in the departure lounge by arctic monkeys. listen to it. i dare you. slap this ho with a review, if you have the time. to me, it ends kind of abruptly, i dunno. i wrote tyler and the narrator as two different people, just so you know. this is an intepretation from the novel, not the movie. sorry for any mistakes, this goes without editing from a beta.

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**Eulogy **

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><p><em>"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."<em>  
>—Narcotics Anonymous<p>

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><p>People are either tragedies or comedies in the end. Just because you're life isn't written with the eloquence of William Shakespeare, doesn't mean you haven't lived a life of extreme melancholy or blatant humor.<p>

To her though, the most abhorred thing was to live a life of both. It was like the world— no matter how much she loathes to say it, because it sounds cheesy and _stupid_, maybe even like _god_ —dealing you a defective card and then laughing at you in the face when you are subjected to the consequences.

Life was like avowing hallelujah over and over, a wayfarer stranger ejecting the word, through gritty lips— different every single time, for every single person. Never can it last forever and almost no one— when you think about it in terms of the amount of population —makes an impact that undoubtedly makes you a legend.

_What a pathetic thing to dream_, she says, sneering with sarcasm, _and maybe, I can fly too_.

But— Tyler is the one with this sense of living forever, when no—they really won't. They're all dying slowly, some faster than others—none of them are going to fucking live forever. Didn't he know that the only certainty in life is death?

Marla thinks, you're the fucking imposter.

Tyler smirks, though more like a grimace —not quite an upturn of the lips, but more than a line—, giving her flying cheek and flicking at her cigarette, that's barreling out of the corner of her mouth— quite mockingly, perhaps. Speaking to her without affection, but letting his fingers find a purchase at her waist. Like it's always been—not about loving her adequately, or hating his best friend immensely— it's about Tyler, believing he's void and needing compensation, rife in his mind, spreading like cancer. It's _always_ about Tyler believing he's void and needing compensation. For Tyler, it was never about guilt, it's about the value of life. Tyler thinks life itself is remarkable, something to be held close and precious, though he constantly treats it worthless.

Marla thinks, life is miserable and thinks Tyler should think it is miserable too.

Marla thinks, you're the fucking liar.

Marla thinks, nothing is going to change.

—

She truly wonders if it's a shame, the fact that she doesn't die.

She kept waiting, and waiting— with her cigarette acutely stuck between two awkwardly spaced teeth, as she takes drag after drag, the ash tilting out onto the annealed palms, staining them a slight charcoal, and when she rubs them up Tyler's shirt they stain there too.

And then, it happens—she doesn't die.

She guesses the even more shameful thing, is the silence she's struck with inside of her mind. Quiet that makes her go crazy for—minutes, hours, days at a time—and what for? Just so she doesn't die? It's not exactly as if she has the ample desire to die. No, not really. She's not some martyr.

That's Tyler's curtain to hide behind.

—

Marla makes a lot of assumptions, and perhaps is thought to be a little brash and rude— just a bit bitchy in a sense, some people say for no reason— and sometimes she talks about irrelevant topics and loves only things that can't love her back,—

(She truly is only pretty one day out of thirty—, and_ that _is being a_ bit_ optimistic. When her cigarette doesn't turn her teeth a particular shade of crusading yellow, outlined with dark magenta lipstick, that is smudged on the corner of her mouth, or when her chin-length, coal-black hair isn't tangled or wrinkled, with a few uncombed barbs.)

—but, she reasons with contempt, when is there time to be those godforsaken adjectives like _kind_ and _respectful_, when you could die at any moment?

There isn't.

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Tyler always said, never, ever look down. It'll be the death of you— pulling you inside of its dark depth of gliding air, grasping at your arms, until you effortlessly plummets, into cement grave and metal bar imprints carved like crescents into your palms.

It'll be such a tragedy, he smirked darkly once— one of the few times he's truly dark-dark. You'd be called that one fucking idiot, who died because she fucking looked down.

She didn't laugh with him.

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The world could be crumbling and wasting— falling down over the vulgar, matchstick Marla Singer, who sinks like a board in the wading waters, because she's guilty. Her body, frozen, and it's like she can't swim, and no one cares because to everyone else their world isn't falling and then she just stops trying to swim.

And, Marla really can't convince herself that this is her rock-bottom, because it feels much too, too much like floating.

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What's it like to never sleep? She asks, peeling his fingers away from the frayed _Reader's Digest, _a few pages dog-eared or scrawled on.

_What's it like to feel guilt all the time?_ He questions back, his mouth thick with graphite and the flavor of sweat and blood, the swelling of his jaw black and purple and she wants to know if it hurts. It's quiet, it almost seems like he's prolonging a cough and Marla wonders if she should get him some sink water or stop giving secondhand smoke, but she settles for leaving burn marks with her stub on his palms and puffing out a stream of white into his eyes.

_What's it like to be a heartless bitch? What's it like to die, but then resurrection? What's it like to lose everything? What's it like to smoke cigarettes all the time? What's it like to get hugged by a sweaty as fuck, Bob, the bitch tits? _

_Oh, wait, I know—_

Marla squints at him for a strange moment, not listening to his rambling dialogue. She figures his response is due to the fact that she never answers him, but whatever.

She's almost gone from the room, permeating with the smell of the elderly and musky, moth-bitten blankets— residing on Paper Street —when she hears him.

It must be really fucking annoying to answer a question with a question, he says.

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Sinners never sleep, Marla says, lips coasting on the shell of his ear, crassly running her calloused thumbs over his belt buckle, and sleepers never sin.

He chooses to stay silent; alternating looks between his thumbed through _Reader's Digest_ and the partly open freezer, filled with fat, while she hums on his skin, off-key. She bites the long column of his throat; he resists the urge to vomit the eminent bile rising there.

She mouths along it, in long, lazy strokes. So tell me. Are you a sinner or a sleeper?

He swallows hard.

She says against his mouth, I think you are.

He's cloying on claret, chipping talons, cheap beer breath, and smoke-gorged souls.

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He thinks, she's the fucking liar.

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**fin **


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